Guide / Tutorial The Popular Guide to Exploration

Lance 'Spacecat' D.

Lance 'Spacecat' D.
Hey everyone, with the interdictions being horrible early 1.4, I hear a lot of players are going out into the black. I took advantage of a server outage to get some work done and wrote a useful guide for players new to exploration: The Popular Guide to Exploration.

It's designed to be easy to read, a bit of fun, and gives the material in easy to digest bite-sized chunks. Although it's intended for new players, I even had some more experienced players tell me they learnt a few tricks from it.
My inspiration was Hanako's own Popular Guide to Powerplay. (Another Aisling's Angel, go us!)

Everyone, freely share this guide with folks unused to exploration. It might help them out. :)
 
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Kavaros

K
KAVAROS' SLIGHTLY MADDENED GUIDE TO EXPLORATION (CONDENSED VERSION)

- FRIENDSHIP DA DRIVE
- DODGE DA STAR
- HONK DA HORN
- LOOK DA BLUE ONES
- repeat until the cramped galley on your stripped-down explorer vessel runs out of salt and ketchup, leaving you to go insane with the mind-numbing isolation and hardship of deep space travel
 

Jarsil

J
Lance 'Spacecat' D. said:
Hey everyone, with the interdictions being horrible early 1.4, I hear a lot of players are going out into the black. I took advantage of a server outage to get some work done and wrote a useful guide for players new to exploration: The Popular Guide to Exploration.

It's designed to be easy to read, a bit of fun, and gives the material in easy to digest bite-sized chunks. Although it's intended for new players, I even had some more experienced players tell me they learnt a few tricks from it.
My inspiration was Hanako's own Popular Guide to Powerplay. (Another Aisling's Angel, go us!)

Everyone, freely share this guide with folks unused to exploration. It might help them out. :)
Click to expand...

Awesome and funny work man, have some rep!
 

AnnuverScotinExile

AnnuverScotinExile
Nice. Some issues, though:

Slide 6: That is absolutely NOT the ETA. It is how long you would take to arrive at the destination at the current (apparent since this is all faffing about with spacetime) speed. But since when you are close to your destination gravitational affects on the mechanism are slowing you down, it will take quite a bit longer than that time to arrive.
Slide 10: The discovery scanner DOES NOT work just by pointing at the object. You have to target it as well.
Slide 19: I'm surprised you did not comment on the AA-A systems.
 

Lance 'Spacecat' D.

Lance 'Spacecat' D.
AnnuverScotinExile said:
Nice. Some issues, though:

Slide 6: That is absolutely NOT the ETA. It is how long you would take to arrive at the destination at the current (apparent since this is all faffing about with spacetime) speed. But since when you are close to your destination gravitational affects on the mechanism are slowing you down, it will take quite a bit longer than that time to arrive.
Slide 10: The discovery scanner DOES NOT work just by pointing at the object. You have to target it as well.
Slide 19: I'm surprised you did not comment on the AA-A systems.
Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing this out... So challenge: For the slide 6 issue, I want to keep things short and sweet even if it makes things not-absolutely-exact. Can you give me a word or two that mean 'how long you would take to arrive at the destination at the current (apparent since this is all faffing about with spacetime) speed. But since when you are close to your destination gravitational affects on the mechanism are slowing you down, it will take quite a bit longer than that time to arrive.' I chose 'ETA' as 'good enough', if you have a better single-word or two-word, do tell!

Slide 10, I'll work on it.
Slide 19... I actually don't know what's peculiar about AA-A, what about them? (And I haven't explained all the peculiarities of the letters, this is a -beginner's- guide)

Edit: Okay, so AA-A is about super rare stars, like wolf-rayets, right? Hrrrm, I'm debating mentioning anything about that since the focus of slide 19 is 'recognizing scoopables by name' and hinting there's other tricks behind those names. I never intended to cover the entire subject. Maybe a link to the wikia page that gives more info would work? What do you guys think?
 
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Maia Posidana

Maia Posidana
An excellent guide you created here. However I would like to offer a minor correction that could help save time and ships. In the event that you supercruise into a star, the best thing to do is to immediately turn off EVERYTHING...Except your power core, power distributor, and thrusters. Yes this means turning off your life support as well. You especially want to turn off your fuel scoop.

Next immediately on target whatever body you are locked onto. Point directly away from the star boost away and hit super cruise. Turning off all of your ship's systems except the ones I've mentioned will have two beneficial effects. The first being that they will keep your heat down even once you engage your supercruise. The second being without the extra power draw your supercruise will power up and engage much much faster. Your heat will spike a little bit but just continue cruising directly away from the star until the heat index drops off. From that point you are free and safe to select another celestial object to cruise to or another start to jump to.

As a final note ( and yes it is easy to forget. I've done it myself.) Once clear of the star remember to turn all of your system is back on especially your life support.
 
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Lance 'Spacecat' D.

Lance 'Spacecat' D.
Thanks for the tip Maia. I didn't actually know you could reduce the heat output by turning off a ton of stuff. I'm considering it, but... With my apologies I won't ~quite~ put that advice in this popular guide, for these reasons:
1-I'm a little tight on space in that slide to explain all this. c.c;
2-This guide's intended to skim over the basics and keep it easy to digest, not go super in depth on every subject.
3-Exploration ships, setup 'as explorers', have scanners that take almost no power, a drive and thrusters. This leaves remarkably little to turn off thus making minimal difference (life support and maybe weak shields?).

Soo, thanks for the input, but for now I'm of a mind to 'keep it simple'. Maybe I'll try to sneak in a mention to turn off nonessential modules when out of the bubble somewhere, your advice would fit well in there.

Yeah, my philosophy atm is 'It is perfect when I can't remove anything else, not when I cannot add anything else' :p

And back to the ETA thing on slide 6, a friend suggested to call it Quote-ETA-Unquote. XD I Rather like that idea.
 

Lance 'Spacecat' D.

Lance 'Spacecat' D.
Well, I just wrote a small update to this, some examples how to outfit a craft for both exploration and planetary landings in mind.
Also, links at the end point to other 'Popular Guides'. There are now four in the series: Powerplay, Exploration, Mining and Planetary landings.

I still think the exploration one is my nicest.
 

Chrystoph

Chrystoph
I'd like to add my thanks! I joined the community and immediately got bit by the explorer bug.

This guide has helped me to focus and set specific goals for where I want to go in character development.
 
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